Recommended for anyone fascinated or appalled by the enduring romance

SUZUKI
between settler societies and (imagined) wildness.
DAVID McDERMOTT HUGHES :
, ,

Suzuki unfolds a devastating arc of local and national politics in which nature

RACE, ANIMALS, AND NATION IN ZIMBABWE

THE NATURE OF WHITENESS
animal lifebecomes the site for the working through of national-historical narratives
that are simultaneously cynical, vengeful, and powerfully redemptive.
HUGH RAFFLES, :

"Brilliantly explores a cultural poetics that mapped propositions about race and
animals into ideas about nature, national belonging, sovereignty and the state.
Suzuki shows how whiteness in Zimbabwe was less an empirical or sociological
fact than a moral and argumentative projectone that was dense with
contradiction, yearning, and regret."
ERIC WORBY,

THE
THE NATURE OF WHITENESS explores the intertwining of race and nature in postin-
dependence Zimbabwe. Nature and environment have played prominent roles in white
Zimbabwean identity, and when the political tide turned against white farmers after inde-

NATURE
pendence, nature was the most powerful resource at their disposal. In the s, Mlilo,
a private conservancy sharing boundaries with Hwange National Park, became the first
site in Zimbabwe to experiment with wildlife production, and wildlife tourism soon
became one of the most lucrative industries in the country. Mlilo attained international

OF
notoriety in as the place where Cecil the Lion was killed by a trophy hunter.
The Nature of Whiteness is a fascinating account of human-animal relations and the inter-
play among categories of race and nature in this embattled landscape.

YUKA SUZUKI is associate professor of anthropology at Bard College.

WHITENESS

CULTURE,
RA C E, A N IMA LS , A N D
PLACE, N ATIO N IN ZIMBA BWE
AND
NATURE
Y U K A SU Z U K I
----

Seattle and London
www.washington.edu/uwpress
Culture, Place, and Nature
Studies in Anthropology and Environment
K. Sivaramakrishnan, Series Editor

Centered in anthropology, the Culture, Place, and Nature series encompasses new inter-
disciplinary social science research on environmental issues, focusing on the intersec-
tion of culture, ecology, and politics in global, national, and local contexts. Contributors
to the series view environmental knowledge and issues from the multiple and often
conflicting perspectives of various cultural systems.
THE
NATURE
OF
WHITENESS
R ACE, A NIMA LS, A ND
N ATION IN ZIMBA BWE

YUKA SUZUKI

University of
Washington Press
Seattle and London
Copyright 2017 by the University of Washington Press
Printed and bound in the United States of America
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Composed in Warnock, typeface designed by Robert Slimbach
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information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

University of Washington Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Suzuki, Yuka, author.
Title: The nature of whiteness : race, animals, and nation in Zimbabwe / Yuka Suzuki.
Other titles: Culture, place, and nature.
Description: Seattle : University of Washington Press, 2017. |
Series: Culture, place, and nature
Identifiers: LCCN 2016035956| ISBN 9780295999531 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780295999548 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: WhitesRace identityZimbabwe. | Nature conservationZimbabwe. |
Wildlife managementZimbabwe. | ZimbabweRace relations.
Classification: LCC DT2913.E87 .S89 2017 | DDC 305.80906891dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016035956

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Library Materials, ANSI Z39.481984.
CONTENTS
Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan vii
Acknowledgmentsix
List of Abbreviations xiii

1 The Leopards Black and White Spots 3

2 A Short Settler History 27

3 Black Baboons and White Rubbish Trees 45

4 Reinstating Nature, Reinventing Morality 78

5 The Uses of Animals 105

6 Wildlife Contested 136

Notes157
Bibliography177
Index195
FORE WORD
A small but growing body of scholarship across fields such as social or medical
history, anthropology of body and ethnicity, and the politics of citizenship has
grappled with the cultural politics of race, specifically the idea of whiteness
and its community of belonging in locations where white settlement occurred
after 1492. To this emergent scholarship Yuka Suzuki offers a powerful and
well-crafted addition that approaches the topic through concern with terrain,
wild animals, and inhabitation.
A little over a decade ago, Donald Moore, Jake Kosek, and Anand Pandian
described what they called landscapes of affect, where race and nature gain
their tangible presence... through the play of passionate desires, fears, and
faiths.1 Yuka Suzuki delivers a monograph about such landscapes of affect
in Zimbabwe, where race and nature collide as white and back inhabitants
reimagine and enact their relations to each other and the wild animals caught
between them.
Visible whiteness is the creative analytical category that Suzuki develops
and deploys to unpack the logic of white settler relations to land and black
Zimbabweans in her brave and lucid study of whiteness, nature conservation,
and contested belonging in twenty-first-century southern Africa. How white
settlers imagined themselves into a landscape they had only recently entered,
through conquest and displacement of natives, is a topic that has received some
attention in the Americas and occasionally in antipodean settings such as Aus-
tralia or New Zealand. Histories of land and struggles around it in Africa have
less often paid close attention to the sentiments and attachments of white set-
tlers, who have more easily been rendered as the rulers and expropriators, with
a more instrumental and exploitative relation to the landincapable of ideas
of stewardship or care in these foreign territories.
Especially across eastern and southern Africa, transitions following the end
of colonial rule included redefining vast areas earlier marked as game reserves
and protected forests or wildlife sanctuaries. Intense pressure on land for

vii
African farmers and pastoralists, pushed aside or confined in earlier times,
made the transitions explosive. Land invasions, decimation of wild animals,
and attacks on settler lifestyles that had been expansive and exclusive in their
use of land and forest scarred the land as well as settler-native relations. Settlers
asserted their claims and attachments to their land by displaying their inti-
mate familiarity with nature, wildness, and conservation ideas. Beleaguered
settlers worked hard, after Zimbabwean independence, to articulate a lived and
worked landscape on which they remainedno longer as cattle ranchers, but
increasingly as custodians of the wild animals that, like them, faced extinction,
as they became objects of fear or desire, identified as bearers of unbridled wild
power that was out of place and order in a majority-ruled nation.
Suzukis sensitive ethnography unveils the predicament of the white set-
tlers without buying into their exculpatory accounts about land that was still
very unevenly distributed between them and native Africans in Zimbabwe.
Along the way, she provides a fascinating account of human-animal relations
and the interplay between the categories of race and nature through which
interpersonal relations forged in this embattled landscape are sustained or
break down.
As the study of human-animal relations moves more predictably into the
purview of multispecies ethnography, Suzuki reminds us of all that remains to
be learned by inspecting the natural history of race relations via human rela-
tions with wild animalsas food, spectacle, farm companions, and indices of
civility and belongingat times of dramatic social upheaval.

K. Sivaramakrishnan
Yale University

viiiForeword
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not have been possible without the generosity and kindness of
the farmers of Mlilo. I owe my greatest debt to Jon and Marie Van den Akker,
whom I can only refer to by pseudonym, but whose encouragement, fiery spirit,
and humor sustained me throughout my research in Zimbabwe.
The scholars I met at the University of Zimbabwe offered input that helped
shape this project in significant ways. I extend my gratitude to Vupenyu Dzin-
girai, Elias Madzudzo, Isaac Malasha, Phanuel Mugabe, James Murombedzi,
Marshall Murphree, and Nontokozo Nabane for sharing their knowledge and
ideas. The Centre for Applied Social Sciences at the University of Zimbabwe,
where I was affiliated as a research associate, provided me with institutional
support during my fieldwork. The research on which this book is based was
funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council,
the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University, and the Yale Center for
International and Area Studies.
Over the years, many people have provided commentary on chapters or
entire drafts of this book. Others have influenced its development through
ongoing conversations and exchanges. I thank Megan Callaghan, Rebecca
Cassidy, Jean Comaroff, Carole Crumley, Bill Derman, Michle Dominy, Omri
Elisha, Abou Farman, James Ferguson, Harold Forsythe, Amanda Hammar,
Donna Haraway, Rebecca Hardin, Jeff Jurgens, Yoonhee Kang, Jake Kosek,
Cory McCruden, Pamela McElwee, Donald Moore, Molly Mullin, Juno Par-
reas, Hugh Raffles, Josh Rubin, Blair Rutherford, Jesse Shipley, Anna Tsing,
Katja Uusihakala, and Vron Ware.
I am profoundly grateful to Eric Worby, whose work in Zimbabwe and
South Africa has been deeply inspiring, and whose brilliant insights and gen-
erosity have been absolutely formative in my own thinking and writing. Bill
Kelly offered exceptional depth and clarity in broadening my knowledge of the
discipline, as well as guidance in my development as an anthropologist. I owe
a particular debt to Luise White, whose innovative work on Rhodesian his-

ix
tory was eye-opening and made me think about the politics of whiteness in
new ways. David Hughes has been an invaluable interlocutor in understanding
the dynamics of race and environment in Zimbabwe. My deepest appreciation
goes to K. (Shivi) Sivaramakrishnan, whose scholarship was one of the reasons
I became a political ecologist, and whose encouragement made the completion
of this project possible. Jim Scott and Shivi maintained the vibrant intellectual
community in the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University that I was
fortunate enough to be part of in 200910. During that year, Ponciano del Pino,
Matt Garcia, Annu Jalais, and Kay Mansfield became close colleagues and co-
conspirators on the second floor of 230 Prospect Street.
At the University of Washington Press, I am grateful to the two anonymous
readers who provided richly detailed feedback on this manuscript. Their sharp
observations and critiques helped me refine and clarify large portions of this
book. I especially thank Lorri Hagman, who has been unfailingly supportive
throughout this process, and whose expert guidance and kindness have been
immeasurable. Sue Carters superb copyediting also benefited this work sig-
nificantly.
Excerpts from chapter 4 of this book were originally published in the Jour
nal of Agrarian Change and have been reproduced here with permission from
John Wiley and Sons. Sections of chapter 5 appeared in the volume Where
the Wild Things Are Now: Domestication Reconsidered, edited by Molly Mul-
lin and Rebecca Cassidy and published by Berg Press, and have been included
with permission from Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. My sincere thanks to Chaz
Maviyane-Davies for allowing me to reproduce his beautiful graphic commen-
taries in this book.
I am fortunate to be surrounded by wonderful colleagues at Bard College.
I am particularly indebted to Laura Kunreuther, who read entire drafts of this
book multiple times, and whose friendship and wisdom have been my anchor
throughout the time weve worked together. Mario Bick, Diana Brown, and
Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins have all offered rich and constructive insights
in relation to my work, and through their warmth and generosity have made
the anthropology department a joy to be part of. I am grateful to Myra Arm-
stead, Christian Crouch, Rob Culp, Tabetha Ewing, Drew Thompson, and
Wendy Urban-Mead for their collaboration and support, and for impressing
upon me the importance of historical thinking.
Last but not least, I owe much to Stephanie Rupp, who has been a steadfast
champion since we first met, and whose energy and spirit always give me cour-
age. I dedicate this book to my family: to both of my parents and my younger

xAcknowledgments
brother, who have allowed me to follow my own path, even when it took me
halfway across the world. To Keizo, who inspires me with his inexhaustible
curiosity about animals. And finally, to Vincent, who has been with me on this
journey since the very beginning; your constant encouragement has made this
project possible.

Acknowledgmentsxi
A BBRE VIATIONS
BSAC British South Africa Company
Campfire Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous
Resources
CBNRM Community-Based Natural Resource Management
CCJPZ Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe
CFU Commercial Farmers Union
CITES Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species
DNPWLM Department of National Parks and Wild Life Management
GKG Gaza-Kruger-Gonarezhou
GPA Global Political Agreement
ICA Intensive Conservation Association
Kaza TFCA Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area
MDC Movement for Democratic Change
NGO Nongovernmental organization
PAC Problem Animal Control
RF Rhodesian Front
SPCA Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
SVC Save Valley Conservancy
TTL Tribal Trust Land
UDI Unilateral Declaration of Independence
UNWTO United Nations World Trade Organization
WINDFALL Wildlife Industries New Developments for All
WPA Wildlife Producers Association
ZANLA Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army
ZANU Zimbabwe African National Union
ZANU-PF Zimbabwe African National UnionPatriotic Front
ZAPU Zimbabwe African Peoples Union
ZIPRA Zimbabwe Peoples Revolutionary Army
ZISCO Zimbabwe Iron and Steel Company
ZNSPCA Zimbabwean National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals

xiii
THE N ATURE
OF WHITENESS
1.1 This image, created by Zimbabwean artist
Chaz Maviyane-Davies, was circulated by the
opposition party, the Movement for Demo-
cratic Change (MDC). The traditional Ndebele
proverb in this context serves as a critique of
ZANU-PFs racially divisive policies.
1
THE LEOPA RDS BL ACK
A ND WHITE SPOTS

Ingwe ikhotha amabala ayo amhlophe lamnyama.

The leopard licks all its spots, black and white.
Ndebele proverb

J
N. Pelling, who authored several textbooks and dictionaries for the
Ndebele language in the 1970s, classifies the leopard proverb as behav-
ior which is commendable. According to Pelling, the observation that
leopards lick all of their spots, regardless of color, upholds the idea that there
should be no favoritism on the basis of race. The idiom gained broad currency in
2000 when it appeared in a collection of images and expressions circulated by
Zimbabwes opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
Through an array of media, MDC activists highlighted the states many fail-
ures, including widespread corruption, the obliteration of a once prosperous
economy, and the siphoning of wealth to the ruling party elite at the expense
of increasingly impoverished Zimbabweans. They forged dialogue in urban
spaces already humming with deep disillusionment: the fiction of democratic
nationhood had long since evaporated, and state claims to legitimacy no lon-
ger held any validity. At the same time, threats of violence from ruling party
supporters were very real. As a result, veiled metaphors and double entendres
figured prominently in the opposition campaign. It was in this context that
the leopard surfaced as one image of the ideal nation, where favoritism does
not exist and basic rights are guaranteed to all, regardless of race, ethnicity, or
political affiliation.
To imagine an absence of favoritism in contemporary Zimbabwe is no easy
task. When Zimbabwe won its independence in 1980, the newly elected prime
minister, Robert Mugabe, appealed for a new amity between the races, of for-
giving and forgetting the past, and building a new nation together.1 The pro-

3
posal shocked the country, and white Rhodesians who had seen Mugabe as the
devil incarnate until that very morning began to believe that he of all people
might represent the best hope for restoring peace and stability to the coun-
try.2 The newly formed government instituted a ten-year period during which
the security of white property would be guaranteed by law. Top-ranking ex-
combatants were then dispatched across the country to visit white farmers and
convince them that they would be genuinely welcome in the new Zimbabwe.
The logic for national reconciliation clearly lay in economic necessity, but was
framed in terms of moral idealism and cross-racial, cross-ethnic collaboration.
By the 1990s, the official rhetoric had changed. A brilliant orator and strate-
gist, Mugabe transformed his bid to retain power into a war over race. Deftly
conjuring specters of colonialism, he labeled white Zimbabweans as enemies
of the state, accused the United Kingdom of neoimperialism, and denounced
Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition party leader, as Tony Blairs tea boy. The
most spectacular outcome of this shift occurred in 2000, as liberation war
veterans occupied thousands of white commercial farms across the country
over the course of a few months.3 Despite repeated court rulings declaring the
invasions constitutionally illegal, they continued to escalate until all but two
hundred of the nations forty-five hundred white commercial farms were occu-
pied. This marked a calculated gamble on the part of the ruling party, the Zim-
babwe African National UnionPatriotic Front (ZANU-PF), which was widely
understood to be the orchestrator of these invasions. By restoring land to the
spotlight, the ruling party deployed the most powerful weapon in its artillery;
land ownership, symbolizing centuries of racial domination, offered the most
direct and incriminating evidence of disproportionate white privilege. The
invasions, according to Mugabe, represented the last round of the liberation
struggle, and the final chance to rid the country of all vestiges of colonialism.4
A majority of Zimbabweans recognized the land invasions as a ploy to divert
attention from the countrys real problems, rooted in an economy on the verge
of collapse. Nonetheless, the stakes for white farmers were high. Nearly all lost
their properties, and dozens were killed through beatings, shootings, and live
torchings.
Faced with the extinguishment of a way of life, farmers have fought to
retain their place in the country, to assert their individual histories, and to
claim the rights of citizenship they feel entitled to after generations of settle-
ment in Africa. This project is by no means a recent undertaking, but one that
these Zimbabweans have been consumed by in the three decades since inde-
pendence. In the context of a rapidly vanishing population, they have drawn on

4 The Leopards Black and White Spots

increasingly creative ways through which to redefine and reassert their claims
to belonging. The challenge is considerable, for how does one make such claims
as a former settler bearing the stigma of history? How does one defend a way of
life based on visible inequalities in wealth? And finally, what forms of ideologi-
cal work are necessary to keep intact a worldview that has become increasingly
indefensible?

VISIBLE WHITENESS

To many in southern Africa, white farmers represent an archetype of rural

conservatism, resolutely loyal to a pre-independence past and stubbornly per-
severing in the post-independence present. They are objects of suspicion but
also romanticization, subject to intense scrutiny while kept at a distance. As
the most publicly recognizable white figures, farmers have been seen as repre-
sentative of entire white populations in southern Africa, collapsing a diversity
of subjectivities and experiences. And while farmers themselves are taken as
iconic, relatively few studies until recently have explored their worlds from the
point of view of the individuals who inhabit them. Much is assumed about
farmers as a category, and it is also often assumed that anything more about
them is not worth knowing. This book attempts to complicate such assump-
tions by exploring the inner workings of rural white worlds in Zimbabwe.
In the global context, images of the white settler circulate as a series of
stereotypes, including monstrous perpetrators of racial oppression, big game
hunters, hefty rugby players, or landowners presiding over vast estates catered
to by multitudes of servants. The reality, however, is far more complex. Settlers
of European descent have long histories in southern Africa, bearing the mark
of some of the most brutal forms of domination the world has ever seen. At
the same time, this region was the site of tremendous aspiration, promising
settlers fortunes and status impossible to attain elsewhere. For most of the
immigrants, these dreams and experiments in social engineering were tied to
the color of their skin, which they believed entitled them to superior positions
in their new society. At the heart of this reinvention, the stakes of being white
took on a new urgency and significance. Whiteness became the very basis on
which privilege was conferred, and thus its boundaries were carefully policed,
and the meaning of whiteness itself took on unequaled weight and power.
Unlike the vast majority of situations where whiteness is unmarked,
white privilege in Africa is glaringly conspicuous.5 In a setting where white-
ness is out of placeboth visually and politically, following independence

The Leopards Black and White Spots 5

racial formations must be attended to explicitly, utilizing conscious, rather
than subconscious, forms of articulation. Forced out of its usual conceal-
ment, whiteness becomes a matter of visible ideology as opposed to invis-
ible hegemony. People must work hard to keep their identities intact, as well
as convince themselves and others of their correctness. Such experiences
of whiteness are useful to examine precisely because they bring to the sur-
face processes that are usually hidden. Under a close lens, we can examine
how whiteness is constructed and maintained, and its associated privileges
justified. Making implicit ideas about racial identity explicit allows us to
understand how discourses of whiteness work more generally. At the same
time, a close exploration reveals important differences from experiences
of whiteness in other parts of the world with distinctive histories, political
economies, and social contexts. In both its universalities and specificities,
whiteness in Zimbabwe is instructive to think with, particularly when com-
pared with racial dynamics elsewhere.
Race is always fluid, but the rapidly changing postcolonial landscape has
a way of telescoping racial transformations in Zimbabwe. Before indepen-
dence, the distinction between black and white signaled the stark difference
between a life of guaranteed comfort and privilege on the one hand, and a
life of limited access to inferior education, land, housing, and employment on
the other. Not surprisingly, the absolutism of these categories left an indelible
mark, as racial constructs after independence continued to be shaped by pre-
vious constellations of symbol and meaning. Such effects were perpetuated
by the continued presence of whites in the country, who often carried on as
if very little had changed at independence. From cashier transactions at the
supermarket to the lunch crowd in the tearoom at Meikles, Harares oldest
department store, much of the visible inequality remained unaltered. In this
respect, Zimbabwe was by no means exceptional; many postcolonial coun-
tries have had to deal with the conundrum of how to deal with non-native
settlers after liberation. What did make Zimbabwe unusual, however, was
its staggered transition: the initial ten-year period of national reconciliation,
offering the protection of white business and property, followed by a gradual
intensification of racially charged discourse and policies working against
white interests. The terms of reconciliation were dramatically reversed, and
white Zimbabweans found themselves scrambling to justify and retain the
privileges they once took for granted, even after independence. For whites,
the sudden shift of the ground they stood on spelled certain disaster unless
they could quickly and persuasively argue their claims to belonging within

6 The Leopards Black and White Spots

the country. The particularities of the countrys transition accelerated and
deepened transformations in racial experience, making whiteness in Zimba-
bwe an especially interesting case to explore.
Over the course of the past sixteen years, what began as a crisis for the
nation with the farm invasions has settled into an impasse, with no long-
term resolution in sight. However, the Global Political Agreement (GPA) of
Zimbabwe, which established a power-sharing arrangement between the
ZANU-PF ruling party and the MDC in 2008, did succeed in introducing
greater plurality in political arenas.6 White politicians now occupy key min-
isterial positions and parliamentary seats within the government and form
part of the top leadership in the opposition party. Many white Zimbabweans
have moved away from the label of white European in favor of white Afri-
can, a term that they would have rejected outright in the years immediately
following independence. The public meaning of whiteness in Zimbabwe has
shifted perceptibly: although their presence continues to be an uneasy one
at best, whites have won a degree of inclusion in the national imaginary in
recent years. Thus, the stigma of whiteness is no longer as categorically nega-
tive as it was ten years ago.
Yet the issue of race remains an explosive one, always close to the surface.
Black and white, with their contrasting meanings, still remain inseparable from
the experience of everyday life in Zimbabwe, and race is a constant raw nerve,
exposing the nations deepest vulnerabilities. These dynamics have transna-
tional reverberations as well. When Julius Malema, former president of the
South African National Congress Youth League, popularized the Zulu struggle
song Dubula Ibhunu (Shoot the Boer) in 2010, he ignited deep racial tensions,
inviting both intense support and critique in South Africa.7 The South African
courts subsequently banned the song as a form of hate speech, but Malema
was unrepentant and resumed his trademark performance upon his arrival
in Zimbabwe on an official visit with Robert Mugabe. This move was meant
to signal alliance with a president infamous for mobilizing race as a divid-
ing practice. For Malema, Zimbabwe presented an opportunity in which the
state would not only ignore such explicit threats of violence to Afrikaners, but
might in fact welcome them. While referencing the anti-apartheid struggle in
South Africa, the song registered its intended effect in Zimbabwe. By assigning
accountability exclusively to whites, the song obscures the complex dynamics
that give rise to the countrys situation today. Race serves as a powerful tool,
and understanding whiteness as a site of cultural politics is key to understand-
ing nationhood itself in southern Africa.

The Leopards Black and White Spots 7

NATURE AND WHITENESS

Whiteness in Zimbabwe has many dimensions; this work specifically engages

the ways in which whiteness is articulated in relation to nature. Both nature
and environment play a prominent role in white Zimbabwean identity more
broadly, based on founding mythologies of the pioneers who settled the coun-
try as well as long-standing traditions of leisure activity outdoors. For white
farmers whose livelihoods and identities are embedded within rurality, this
engagement with nature runs especially deep. In this account, I focus on such
connections by exploring the uses of nature in a small white farming com-
munity in western Zimbabwe. I refer to this community by the pseudonym
Mlilo throughout my work to help conceal its identity. My informants names
and some of their biographical details have been changed as well. Nature has
particular significance in this setting because farmers economic success has
always been tied to the environmentwhether in battling its forces or aiding in
the proliferation of its flora and fauna. For the greater part of the twentieth cen-
tury, Mlilo was comprised of vast properties of land devoted to cattle ranching.
In the late 1970s, however, Mlilo became one of the first sites in the country
where farmers pioneered the concept of wildlife production. Throughout the
1980s, they experimented and refined its practice, achieving a complete trans-
formation through which wildlife came to eclipse cattle as the central form of
property and medium of accumulation. Despite this shift, the one constant for
farmers remained the environment around which their livelihoods revolved.
Saturating both their physical and ideological worlds, nature became the cur-
rency through which farmers established their places in the world. The value
of this currency only grew as wildlife tourism became the second highest for-
eign incomegenerating industry in the country in the 1990s. By the end of
the twentieth century, when the political tide turned against them, nature had
become the most expedient and powerful resource they had at their disposal.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Mlilo, this book argues that projects
of whiteness are aligned with projects of nature. This connection has been
highlighted by scholars working in other contexts, including adventure econo-
mies that revolve around encountering nature, where identities other than
whiteness are not sanctioned (Braun 2003); and nature loving students in
Indonesia, who position themselves as cosmopolitan, westernized subjects by
engaging in environmental conservation efforts (Tsing 2005). This alignment
replicates older logics such as those embedded within colonial scientific expe-
ditions, where the act of discovering, hunting, identifying, and naming new

8 The Leopards Black and White Spots

species extended the work of empire and reinforced imperial authority over the
colonies (Haraway 1989). For individuals like Henry Walter Bates of the Ama-
zon, acquiring a reputation as an intrepid explorer, naturalist, and collector of
specimens also secured upward social mobility (Raffles 2003).
Articulations of whiteness in Mlilo thus emerged from long and deep his-
tories of engagements with nature. In contemporary contexts, the most suc-
cessfully commodified forms of identity linked to the environment are those
that make simultaneous claims to indigeneity.8 The ties between whiteness and
nature, on the other hand, are less legible because of the ontological distinction
between indigenous people who live within nature and those who live outside
of it.9 In Mlilo, however, nature was a continual presence in everyday life, as
well as a perpetual counterpoint in everyday discourse. The daily rhythm of
farmwork revolved around tracking wildlife species and numbers, maintain-
ing boreholes and water pans, organizing photographic and hunting safaris
for clients, and importing new species of animals. Because of its pervasiveness
in the physical landscape, moreover, nature also operated as metaphoras in
the example of the leopard proverb referenced at the beginning of this chapter.
At other historical moments, nature was equated with adversarial wilderness,
against which stories of heroic achievement unfolded. White farmers in Mlilo
thus have routinely called upon the environment to naturalize and legitimize
their claims to belonging.
In sum, nature has served as an essential vehicle and medium for construc-
tions of whiteness. This work specifically addresses four key sites of practice
where this connection has been consistently forged: the metaphorical uses of
nature in discourses concerning racial difference, the transformation from cat-
tle to wildlife ranching and the development of the safari industry, conserva-
tion as a depoliticizing tool in refiguring white identity, and the reinforcement
of social hierarchies through animal-based practices and meanings. Within
nature more broadly, wildlife has carried particular significance in Mlilo due
to the emphasis that the Zimbabwean state has historically placed on conser-
vation policies, as well as existing global political economies of wildlife tour-
ism. The aforementioned dynamics are specific to Mlilo, and one might argue
that articulations of whiteness in this context are distinctly contingent upon
place. At the same time, they reflect much larger valences of meaning that fuse
white identity, nature knowledge, and environmental consciousness. These ties
are clearly amplified in Mlilo, but they make sense only because they capitalize
on ideas that already have long-standing cultural resonance.

The Leopards Black and White Spots 9

ENCOUNTERING MLILO

In July 1997, at the very first Rural District Council meeting that I attended, I
spied a single white person sitting in the room, surrounded by a sea of black fig-
ures. Occupying one end of a table that he shared with two district councilors,
he was in his early thirties and wore a jacket with a tear in the back seam that
was visible even from a distance. I wondered at first whether he was a develop-
ment worker, but over the course of the meeting, I came to realize that he was
in fact a white district councilor. Up until that point, it had not occurred to me
that white Zimbabweans continued to be involved in politics after indepen-
dence. As recognition dawned, I began to read arrogance in his voice, his lan-
guage, his gestures, and even the disproportionate amount of speaking time he
claimed at the meeting. At one point, he turned around in his seat and smiled
at me. Caught off guard, I didnt return his smile, but met his eyes briefly before
looking away. At the time, I never would have guessed that this very same per-
son would become a close friend a few years later.
When I think back to my reactions to Riann during our very first encoun-
ter, I know that they were informed by a set of assumptions on my part about
which side I should be positioned on, as well as my lack of basic understand-
ing about the social and political workings of the country. And yet my response
was also a direct product of the ways in which most Western scholars have
approached the question of white settlers in Africa. As lingering and distaste-
ful reminders of colonialism, settlers constitute the exotic Other, but one
not entitled, at least until recently, to serious consideration. Thus, the idea of
focusing on white farmers had never crossed my mind when I began working
in Zimbabwe. My first trip to the country during the summer of 1997 was as
an environmental anthropologist-in-training, and emerged from a desire to
see the country that had pioneered sustainable utilization through the Com-
munal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (Campfire),
one of the most renowned Community-Based Natural Resource Management
(CBNRM) programs in the world. By the mid-1990s, critiques of the program
and its failures were already beginning to appear in publications, but attitudes
in general were still full of hope and promise. Campfire was crowned as the
definitive solution to community-conservation conflicts, and the instances
of failure were understood to be exceptions caused by isolated local circum-
stances.10
After a four-week visit to Hwange National Park, the countrys oldest
and largest national park, I returned to Harare and the University of Zim-

10 The Leopards Black and White Spots